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Comment by jwr | Hacker News Reader

I gave up on trying to report abuse to Google, Amazon or Microsoft. It seems reports simply get ignored and the big providers do nothing. I hope the FSF with its weight and media presence can finally do something.

Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are my major sources of spam. These days, this is where spam comes from.

At this point, they are also too big to block. We allowed this to happen, through neglect and laziness. Even in this discussion: how many people use Gmail as their primary email service?

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On YouTube I reported bot accounts for a couple days, the only reaction I got was that at some point it showed a popup that told me too many false reports would lead to a ban. Not sure what Google gets out of it, but there is no way they could be that bad at fighting bots unless they're not even trying. Even trivial tricks like copy-pasted texts keep working.

Bot comments and uploads count in KPIs. Blocking/Removing bots = KPIs look worse.

Google makes loads of money through scam ads and fake/AI slop videos. Anyone trying to get in the way of that is putting Google's profits at risk, hence why they shut down legitimate accounts but scammers just run free.

They're not trying. I've seen an advertiser remain active for months with literally tens of thousands of ads where clicking them directly downloads a malicious exe file that most antivirus scanners flag.

They make money on those ads, you’re asking a mega corporation to make less money. Good luck.

Tech support scams still?! I don't even understand how this is possible. If Google wanted to they could come up with the tech to bypass the spam/scammers own ghosting system. They must have some kind of invisible Google bot that checks for downloads/scams, right?

Phone providers should also be detecting this with AI. There is no way this should be occurring anymore.

They're definitely not trying - in any form. I run a marketplace for dogs (i.e. craigslist for puppies & dogs) and scammers are always trying to post fakes ads. They always use Gmail accounts. Every time I ban a gmail address, they scammers will just get a new one. Same scammer/person has created thousands of gmail accounts and Google doesn't care. I have reported this to Google. For the amount of info Google has on people, trivial for them to prevent some of this.

Until a scammer uses some of your information then you get banned from Google with no way to appeal.

Shadowbans work much better for this purpose

Meanwhile, because I've worked for several startups who have used Google Workspaces, if I (try to) open a new Google account, phone verification fails because my phone number "has been used too many times".

Some places suggest "try logging into Google with your phone number, and deleting the account that's associated, if you don't need", that just ... doesn't work.

Worse, they're actively working to allow malicious activity. Meta made 10% of it's revenue, around $16B from known scams: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

Why would they? Their ad dollars spend the same, and they have no incentive to police it when they are protected by section 230.

Edit: I’m not implying this is morally right or good for anyone but Google shareholders. This is just 21st Century American capitalism

We had that issue of someone advertising fake clones of our sites specifically to push fake malware ridden payloads. We only got it handled by bugging internal contacts at Google. It sucked and worse we had to bug them for weeks because the attacker was churning through multiple domains and probably over 100 breached Ad accounts by the time they stopped

> popup that told me too many false reports would lead to a ban

That would imply that someone actually sees them... vs shoving them under the rug, or giving them to a bot to delete.

This is called a monopoly. I know people who run their own mail servers to be as independent as possible. Ironically, they show up as spam in Gmail all the time because "This message is similar to messages that were identified as spam in the past." Meanwhile, it's a fucking simple one paragraph message to a programming mailing list. They have to wrestle with DMARK or choose not to as they feel DMARK is playing into the hands of the monopolies giving them too much influence and power over something as simple and fundamental as email.

DMARC isn't really that big of an issue to wrestle with, and I don't see how it gives anybody influence or power.

The thing is, it's a mess to set up if you are not doing it correctly - which is all too easy if you are not doing this day-to-day.

Spammers however, they have an economic incentive to have experts set up SPF, DMARC and all the other crap to appear legitimate.

I think that this is overstated, it takes ~15 minutes to set up SPF and DMARC correctly and few people run their own email servers.

https://workaround.org/ispmail-trixie/anti-spoofing-dkim-spf...

If you’re not capable of setting up DMARC correctly then it’s a safe assumption you aren’t capable of adequately securing your email server. Which is even easier to mess up with much higher consequences. Even if you are not intending to be a spammer, if your server gets pwned you will become an unwitting one.

I set up my orgs SPF/DKIM/DMARC (we self host, they have feelings about corporate data sovereignity...) it look about 30 min having never touched them before, and maybe another 15 to write an ansible playbook to rotate the keys.

We do have a _tremendous_ amount of spam fail these checks, as well as a few legitimate organizations.... Some of our peer companies have sent out notices that they will bounce anything that fail these checks in the coming years, and we're probably going to to do the same before too long.

It's trivially easy, and absolutely valuable

Not me, but then most people are allergic to paying $10 a month.

I figure an email is worth a beer.

That must be some good beer!

More likely at that price it's not good, it's just in a sports arena.

You haven't been to <city>

Worse than private email.

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